Sunday, February 19, 2017

I Really Made That Mistake Eleven Times?

I got the copy edited manuscript
for Another Man’s Ground four days ago. This is the stage when a person of
exacting standards and keen grammatical skill scrutinizes every word, punctuation
mark, and fact in 338 pages of text. This person is my best friend.

I’m reading through everything –
accepting changes, evaluating suggestions, answering questions. I’m about
halfway through and so far, it’s become apparent that I don’t know how to
punctuate around an em dash. And that I miscounted the number of days that transpire
between two significant plot points. And that I call one character different
names in different chapters (Bill or Lee – pick one!).

This might sound like painful
reading, but I love it. I am very, very picky about details and grammar, and I enjoy
delving back into my book at that level. It’s great to have a copy editor who
has the same (or greater) level of obsessiveness as I do. I also appreciate not
looking like an idiot when the book comes out.

And if a book copy editor can
keep a writer from looking stupid, that’s nothing compared with what a
newspaper copy editor can do. Having a fictional character with two different
names is one thing, but imagine spelling the name of the city’s mayor wrong. On
the front page. Or mixing up the numbers of a phone hot line that the copy
editors catch because they called it right before deadline and discovered it went
to somebody’s Aunt Marge and not the animal shelter featured in the news story.

I don’t think I ever spelled the
name of a politician in one of my cities wrong, but I did once spend an entire
breaking police story writing that a priceless Aston Martin was stolen from an
airplane hanger. Now, a “hangar” is where you park an airplane. A “hanger” is
what you put a coat on. Thankfully, one of the best copy editors in the
business caught it, and my front page story ran error-free.

An editor friend of mine pointed out that I had written "Kung Fu mustache" when I meant "Fu Manchu mustache." Still, I see published books with egregious errors all the time. Copy editors seem to be expendable luxuries these days.